Current situation: President Trump doesn't believe in useless climate deals based on complex, multivariate models that claim to predict the temperature of the planet for the next 80 years, whereas the more pro-science Democrats don't believe walls work.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 3, 2019
Fighting the Modians at Patreon, PayPal and Mastercard
The business model of Silicon Valley is to reap outsized profits by achieving a (temporary) monopoly. This is the premise behind Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Instead of competition persisting over time, all the competition takes place in the startup phase, and the winner of this phase reaps all the profit. As a side effect, it creates a perfect environment for Modians to take charge, once the winner is declared. The effect is enhanced by the little-known (outside of Silicon Valley) truth that the best technology does *not* often win. Usually, it’s the best marketing.
David Boxenhorn, on Facebook
I watched YouTuber Law’s latest update on the letter he’s putting together about the deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad (and all the rest) by Patreon. His intention is to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in the US rather than bringing a suit against any of the tech companies directly. That’s probably a smart legal plan (he knows much more than I do) but he will be fighting huge entrenched interests. His videos are below but I’ll sum them up: he’s building an ad hoc team of (highly skilled) volunteers and he thinks he has enough case law and evidence to get the FTC to start an investigation which would have much more power and weight than a collection of law suits. It would also be financed by government money.
If you haven’t already read Mundia and Modia, you may well want to.
I wanted to put some broader context around this and that’s why I quoted David at the start on how Silicon Valley and modern Tech business works. This all feeds into and flows from David’s thesis of Mundia and Modia. It also links up with the law suit I’m supporting by JPB Liberty against Google and Facebook for banning many different crypto based technologies from advertising on their platforms about a year ago.
The Federal Trade Commission is part of government. As such it will staffed by modians, people who are far removed from objective criteria of success in business or success in a technical and engineering field. This is a hugely important thing to remember when dealing with them.
Patreon, PayPal, Mastercard have all achieved a degree of market dominance in their fields. There might have been better technical competition but these guys are mammoths. As such the objective business criteria for their ongoing success are far removed from the day to day operations of the companies. Mostly their staff can do whatever they want: riding a wave of profitability they inherited from early engineering skills, excellent marketing and a healthy dose of luck. This will carry them along for a while.
The FTC is going to be staffed (especially considering Mundia Modia thinking and following 8 years of Obama) via the revolving door system between big business and the US government. Massive lobbying money has completely corrupted Washington DC. It is into this quagmire that YouTuberLaw’s letter will be sent.
As we’ve seen this week with the massive layoffs across Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, in some parts of the tech world easy profitability is going away. My belief is the entire advertising supported business model is stretched very thin and the numbers upon which Google and Facebook have grown are being understood to be grossly inflated. Everything downstream from them (and that includes “businesses” like Huffpo and Buzzfeed) which rely on web traffic and eyeballs flowing from social media sites will start to feel pain.
There has been a recent uptick in linking the brands of online advertising with the nature of user generated content it appears alongside. Today this is a modian idea to drive forward their “social justice” agenda but it was first done a few decades ago by figures like Mary Whitehouse in the UK and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the US. It has been taken to new levels of effectiveness by the far-left today. Thinking this would help them fight against online competitors for your attention, the mainstream media (M5M) thought they’d ride the wave, they’re also getting caught in the destructive tsunami now too.
The promise of digital advertising was that it can be much more targeted, if that’s really coming true, every advertising based business, even Facebook and Google, the two most capable targeted advertising delivery systems, will do themselves out of business because advertising just shouldn’t be as big an industry as it is today and the entire media world that is built around it is probably a house of cards.
So returning back to the financial deplatforming of non-advertising supported media endeavours (like Sargon of Akkad, Alex Jones, Milo and even myself): advertising supported media is going to change dramatically. I still can’t see the future but I can tell the status quo is changing very fast. Everything that can be done to stop payment systems which bypass the advertising support model from capture by the far-left, cultural marxists must be done which is why I wish YouTuberLaw and JPB Liberty both every success in shaking up these industries.
My video with Andrew Hamilton explaining the JPB Liberty law suit:
YouTuberLaw videos, two updated:
If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.
What if you want to give value for value using Crypto Currency?
First I’m going to share two videos: they’re the two best short explanations of how to buy crypto currency (probably Bitcoin is your best bet) and how to use it to support content creators via a site, Bitbacker, which mimics the basic functions of Patreon (without taking the very large % cut that site took. Both videos are by Naomi Brockwell who does a great job explaining the world of the blockchain and crypto currencies to both newbies and experts. After that I’ll tell you why old media and advertising supported media are dying.
The entire mainstream media business model for news (and a fair amount of other content) is collapsing. The viability of advertising supported content is being destroy and won’t come back. Efforts to migrate into the digital world the old business model that moved from print, magazines, radio and eventually TV across the last century will fail. Essentially the old media businesses were based on scarce and limited supply: there was a constrained amount of space for adverts in each newspaper. The prime TV shows ran once a week. Limited supply, growing demand, rich TV talent and executives.
The digital world has unlimited space for advertisements, so much so they’ve gone crazy rendering many mainstream sites unusable without ad blocking.
The limited commodity today is your attention. Every moment you spend reading my blog or watching my videos is a loss for old media. My overheads are low, my time, a few hundred dollars a year in hosting and other subscriptions. And for those of you reading my blog, you’ve probably found me a more reliable source of information than many main stream sources. If you’ve chosen to thank me with a kind word or a value for value contribution, I’m extremely grateful.
I know my content is always going to be beyond the edges of acceptability for those captured by the cultural marxist mindset, a message of personal freedom, superiority of Western Civilisation and Judeo-Christian values puts me at risk of deplatforming. My content certainly isn’t eligible for YouTube monetisation any more.
That’s why I’m so interested in Bitcoin, crypto currencies and the blockchain. They represent something that is very hard to stop. They can limit options for conversion to fiat currency, but it’s hard to block these so completely as there are many paths. I’m not advocating Bitcoin as some kind of “investment” but right now it is easily feasible to buy $100 of it, pass 10 contributions of $10 out to creators and each creator will get something like 95% of the value rather than somewhere around 80%.
If anyone wants any specific help with the concepts here, please contact me, DM’s on twitter are good and you can find an email link in the sidebar to the right.
Good luck and may the rates be forever in your favour!
If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.
The tells of Jew hatred
A tweet.
If you’re saying any of those things, chances are you’re not a friend of mine. I don’t use the term “antisemite” much, I prefer to say Jew hatred. Because reasons.
I said at the start these are “tells”. Here’s Scott Adams’s definition and explanation of what I really mean by that.
A tell, in this context, means an involuntary action that reveals a person’s inner thoughts in an unguarded moment. In the context of a poker game, a tell might signal a bluff. In the context of police work, a tell might signify a lie. In the context of hypnosis, a tell signifies a switch from rational thinking to irrational thinking.
A tell in this context can mean you guessed the admin password for a human being. The tell is your feedback that the words you used got translated into a physical response. That is the hypnotist’s equivalent of A-B testing. The hypnotist tries an approach and watches for the subject’s physical reaction.
Recognizing tells takes practice. The more tells you spot in your lifetime, the easier it is to find more. Your mind gets tuned to them. You recognize the pattern. You see them coming before they even happen, based on the trigger event.Complicating all of this is the fact that each tell has a false-positive explanation that will always sound plausible. The best way to estimate the odds of a tell being the real thing is by its proximity to a known trigger. If someone exhibits a tell symptom without a trigger, it probably just means you are talking to an idiot. And that happens less than you probably assume it does. All the rest of your “idiot” encounters are smart people experiencing cognitive dissonance and not realizing it.
The Tells (for cognitive dissonance)
And now for the list of tells.
Complete text of Nick Sandmann’s statement
It is worth reading this. And then consider how irresponsible the entire main stream media is for rushing to publish this entire story without getting this statement before they shared anything. This is the problem with 24 hour #FakeNews and its hate filled agenda.
Statement of Nick Sandmann, Covington Catholic High School junior, regarding incident at the Lincoln Memorial
I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.
I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.
When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.
The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.
Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school. Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants. We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.
At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.
After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.
The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.
I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.
I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.
During the period of the drumming, a member of the protestor’s entourage began yelling at a fellow student that we “stole our land” and that we should “go back to Europe.” I heard one of my fellow students begin to respond. I motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.
I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.
The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the busses had arrived and it was time to go. I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the busses. At that moment, I thought I had diffused the situation by remaining calm, and I was thankful nothing physical had occurred.
I never understood why either of the two groups of protestors were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.
I was not intentionally making faces at the protestor. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me — to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.
I harbor no ill will for this person. I respect this person’s right to protest and engage in free speech activities, and I support his chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial any day of the week. I believe he should re-think his tactics of invading the personal space of others, but that is his choice to make.
I am being called every name in the book, including a racist, and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination of my family’s name. My parents were not on the trip, and I strive to represent my family in a respectful way in all public settings.
I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood. My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue.
I love my school, my teachers and my classmates. I work hard to achieve good grades and to participate in several extracurricular activities. I am mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen — that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African Americans or Native Americans. I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart, and did not witness any of my classmates doing that.
I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech.
I am not going to comment on the words or account of Mr. Phillips, as I don’t know him and would not presume to know what is in his heart or mind. Nor am I going to comment further on the other protestors, as I don’t know their hearts or minds, either.
I have read that Mr. Phillips is a veteran of the United States Marines. I thank him for his service and am grateful to anyone who puts on the uniform to defend our nation. If anyone has earned the right to speak freely, it is a U.S. Marine veteran.
I can only speak for myself and what I observed and felt at the time. But I would caution everyone passing judgement based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas.
I provided this account of events to the Diocese of Covington so they may know exactly what happened, and I stand ready and willing to cooperate with any investigation they are conducting.
This was posted on Twitter by Jake Tapper. I don’t believe he’ll have learned anything from this.
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